


Disclosure

by asphora



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Angst, F/M, K-Pop - Freeform, One Sided Love, Romance, Seventeen - Freeform, kpop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-12 01:47:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28877439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asphora/pseuds/asphora
Summary: It only takes minutes, sometimes seconds, to lose something built on lifetimes; such is the fragility of the things we hold dear. You didn't mean to love him. This was never your intention when you fell for your life-long best friend, Jeon Wonwoo. In fact, you would've gone to your grave with your feelings if it meant keeping him your life, but the pieces fall where they do and when they fall, they shatter. The truth is supposed to set you free, but you never realized that freedom could be this painful.“For love, I will handle your sins.”“And for justice?”“For justice, I will show you mine.”
Relationships: Jeon Wonwoo/Reader, Jeon Wonwoo/You
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5





	Disclosure

**Author's Note:**

> Hiya, guys! Back at it again with some good old angst. If all else fails, indulge the pain, am I right? 
> 
> Anyway, hope this piece finds you guys well and as always, comments, suggestions, and even violent reactions (haha) are welcomed! Just so glad you're reading my work and so thankful that you're taking time to do so. x

> _“For love, I will handle your sins.”  
>  “And for justice?”_

***

Wonwoo’s arm is a sturdy warmth around your shoulder, both your eyes glued to the television screen in front of you. It’s 2 a.m. on a Friday night and you and your best friend are up to your usual plans: dramatic romance movies, popcorn, the two of you wrapped up in warm blankets, curled up on your couch with your head on his shoulder, his arm around yours and the usual sleepover that would ensue soon after.

There must be lifetimes where the two of you are more than this, you muse, but this is the way it’s always been, and despite your hidden feelings for your dearest friend, you wouldn’t change or trade your friendship for the world.

It’s true; you’d be a liar if you said you hadn’t ever wished things were different, that if maybe he or you were different, things between the two of you could _be different._ But this is the lifetime you’re born into; one where you are only his friend, but even then, your gratitude outweighs your yearning every time. So as always, you keep your eyes on the movie, ignoring the way your heart races at his touch despite its familiarity. You let yourself cry through the angsty bits of the movie and even shed a few tears, secretly meant for yours and the main character’s one-sided loves.

Especially now that he had a girlfriend, you’d keep this secret to the grave. Finally, this dork of a best friend of yours had finally managed to snag the girl of his dreams: the long awaited, beautiful girl who you were convinced had probably saved a country in her past life to be this lucky. Admittedly, it hurt to see them together, but despite this, you were thankful for her. She brought joy to light of your life and for that, you’d be forever grateful. So much so that you barely even ever registered the pang of pain in your chest anymore.

Wonwoo had been particularly restless that night, but as his best friend, you knew him well enough to know that if it was something he wanted to share with you, he would and that prying just wasn’t the best way to go about it. So, as he fidgets every few seconds throughout the opening scene of the movie, seemingly looking for a comfortable spot, you let him. You carry on as usual and remain unbothered, completely trusting that when he’s ready he’ll tell you.

Somewhere along the line though, your worries diminish as he finds a comfortable spot, head resting on your shoulder with the blankets snugly pulled up and encasing the two of you in shared warmth. The movie ends and the credits roll. You press the soft cotton of the blanket to your eyes, dabbing the dampness from the tears away. Then, looking up at Wonwoo who at some point had managed to become engrossed enough in the movie to finally focus on it, you saw he was now fighting back the obvious tears in his eyes. Honestly, he did this for every movie, fight back his tears, often saying that he didn’t want to get his glasses wet. Being the wonderful and understanding best friend that you are, you simply let him believe that you believed his reason. But you knew the truth, you knew that he had to stop himself or he’d be an even bigger sopping mess than you by the end of the movie.

“That was so good,” you tell him, offering him the same portion of the cotton blanket you’d used to dab your own tears.

“Yeah,” he agrees, lifting his glasses up to his hair as you move to dab the moisture off his face like you always do, but before you can, he moves back as if recoiling from your incoming touch and he takes the cloth you’re offering, then dabs his face on his own.

You almost raise a brow at the sudden and unusual gesture, but you let it slide. You really weren’t the confrontational type anyway, maybe he was feeling particularly antsy tonight and just didn’t want to feel like a bigger crybaby than his best friend (which to be completely honest, you knew he was and your entire shared friend group knew it too, not that you’d ever tell him though). Instead of saying anything though, you indulge him, grabbing the now empty bowl of popcorn from his lap and getting up to rinse it in the sink.

“Hey,” he says your name in a tone you haven’t heard since high school when he’d accidentally lost your favorite book and just didn’t know how to come clean about it. The sound makes you stop the circular motions of soaping on the bowl in your hands and look right at him.

In the darkness of the room, the only source of light from the moon outside the window and the quiet flashing of the still turned on television with the credits rolling to soft music, you see his expression clear as day. It’s tense and almost stoic. You can tell he isn’t angry at you, but he’s upset and from the twisting of his facial features, you knew he was struggling to get the words out.

You rinse your hands and walk over to him, drying the dampness on the fabric of your hoodie. “Hey, Woo,” you take a spot next to him, an arm instinctively wrapping around his shoulder and a hand from the opposite arm rubbing soothing circles onto the space on his chest where his heart was.

“It’s okay, you can tell me anything.” You say and he believes you, but it isn’t his belief in you that feels tested, but it’s in himself. Could what his girlfriend said to him possibly be true? And if it was, where did they go from there? Where would you and he go from there? Would he be able to bear what he might hear?

Braving his internal panic, he lets the question out, not meeting your eyes as the jumbled mesh of words tumble from his lips: “Do you like me?”

His question catches you of guard and your hands freeze their ministrations on his chest. You look him in the eye and for the first time in all the years you’ve known Wonwoo, you’re at a loss for words. He is too, finally staring back at you and reading the panic and fear that flash across your features. He was so sure you’d say no, but he knows that your silence is answer enough.

He shakes his head, looking down at where your hand is still frozen on his chest and he takes it in his own to remove it and untangles himself from you, shifting slightly on the couch to sit further from you and put enough distance that neither of you are touching. The sudden loss of contact feels cold and foreign to you, but you don’t protest.

“Y/N.” disappointment. You hear it so clearly in his tone that your eyes shift as quick as light to look down at the potted plants on your coffee table in the middle of the living room. Anywhere else but at his face where you know his beautiful, soft features are marred by the same disappointment that drips in his tone.

“I have a girlfriend.”

You’re offended by the way his says it. As if you had any malice or ill intentions towards him, when he was the one who asked first; as if all these years have been some kind of ploy to get him into your bed instead of years built on mutual understanding and adoration that had grown into something deeper than romance.

Hot tears threatened to pour from your eyes. You were going to be sick; how could he think so lowly of you? How could he diminish the sturdy foundations of something built on years of friendship in so few words? It must have been a talent, you thought bitterly, to be so eloquent that he could reduce a soul’s connection to another with so little, so easily.

He on the other hand, reads your tears as an admission of guilt. He watches you, shoulders and frame shaking as you try to fight the sob that wracks through your chest. “To be honest,” he speaks trying to fill the silence as he usually does in moments of uncomfortable confrontation, but you just wish he would stop. The more he spoke, the more his disappointment seemed to seep out of him, spilling out onto the carpet of your freshly made and cleaned apartment, staining everything.

“I didn’t believe it when I heard it at first. I thought Sohee was just being paranoid, but now…” he trails of, letting the pause settle and spread around the room into tension so palpable that even a knife couldn’t cut it, it rang in your ears so much so that you felt that maybe your ears might pop.

“Now, I don’t know.”

You don’t respond. You don’t say anything because like him, you also don’t know. Any attempts at defending yourself seemed futile at this point, especially when it seemed as though he’d made up his mind. Unfortunately, it wasn’t made in your favor.

“I think I should go,” he says, getting up from the couch, pushing the blanket off his lap and gathering his things from a corner of the room.

When he reaches the small hallway in your apartment leading to the door, he turns to face you, finding that you’d quietly followed his movements and were there to see him out despite the tears still streaming down your cheeks that you had left unchecked.

He looks at your shaken form; you devastated from the suddenness of it all, him devastated by what he saw as your betrayal of his trust and at a loss for what would come next. Watching you like that, his heart ached, and he couldn’t help but wrap his arms around you in a comforting embrace.

Crying into his shoulder, soaking his shirt, you wrapped your arms around his waist and shoulders recognizing the hug exactly for what it was at this point. You’d known Wonwoo long enough, had been in love with him long enough to know every meaning and reason behind every movement he made.

This was pity.

You spill a few tears for the friendship you feel like your losing, and for the shear pathos of your situation; how low was low enough at this point? How much more pathetic could you get?

As you cry, you feel him squeeze you before his words break through the sound of your sobbing, “We shouldn’t see each other,” it feels as though his sentence is incomplete, the way it hangs in the air, as if he’s left the last word out before he abruptly adds, “you know, just for a while, while things calm down.”

He says for ‘a while’, but you know that _a while_ piles up; a while could be minutes, even days. A while could also mean years. You knew your best friend like the back of your hand and exactly what he meant by _a while_. It was a kind let go, a caring send off to you; _a while_ , in this case, was a kind goodbye. _A while_ meant never again.

You push of and out of his grip, angry but still gentle in your touch. “Are you serious? Over this small thing, Wonwoo I would never, I’m not that kind of person–”

“It isn’t a small thing,” he cuts you off, a little too aggressively, voice a little too loud, eyes a little too furrowed for your comfort. That’s when you realize, it’s those miniscule changes that make someone so familiar, look so easily like a stranger.

“It isn’t small, please don’t trivialize it.” You try to process his words and almost think that maybe he’s feeling guilt over all the years he hadn’t noticed your feelings, but the next words out his mouth prove otherwise. “It bothers Sohee, and I doubt that would go away, especially now that you’ve admitted it.”

Should you have lied instead? You wonder. As if this situation is on you when you’d never even dared or thought of making your feelings known.

“So, for her sake, for her comfort, I don’t think I can see you right now.”

You feel frozen in place, but your feet feel like their failing you, like you’re being engulfed in quicksand, you already couldn’t move, and just as the cherry on top, you were sinking.

“So that’s it then? An entire lifetime’s worth of friendship, down the drain, just that easily?” You ask, your voice barely above a whisper, not wanting to sound or seem like you were begging for him to stay.

When he doesn’t answer, you try again, “C’mon Woo, we’ve been in each other’s lives for as long as we could remember.” At the words, you feel your resolve to remain dignified failing, “I don’t know this world without you, all our friends are the same, our families are so close, I can’t exist without you, and I-I know it isn’t just me.”

You look into his eyes and watch tears start to pool in them from behind his lenses as you speak, and just when you think you’ve gotten through to him, an apology slips from his lips. “I’m sorry, it isn’t permanent, at least I don’t think it will be. Just till things blow over.”

You feel your firsts clench at your sides. ‘ _Till things blow over?’_ As if this friendship of over fifteen years could ever just _blow over_ , as if the feelings you’ve harbored and taken such great care to hide and protect him from would ever just _blow over_ , for him to minimize this as though forgetting the intertwinement of your lives and souls was as simple as waiting for a storm to cease. Maybe for him it was that simple, but for you, it would be like rebuilding a house after watching it burn down, or losing a limb; you could replace it, remake it, but it would never be the same or as good as what it was before the loss.

With that, he faces the door again. This time his hand is firmer on the doorknob. Even the metal in his hand knows of his certainty and resolve to leave. How lucky it is, you think, to be the last thing he touches, prints embedded into the cold surface, permanent to the memory, but invisible to the eyes the moment he would let go and leave.

At that moment, you feel yourself overcome with a sudden surge of anger that washes over you like a bucket of cold water waking you from your immobility, and the words leave your mouth before you can even think to stop them.

“So what if I love you?”

The tone you use is sharp and Wonwoo doesn’t think he’s ever heard that sound come out of you, let alone directed at him; so striking with how full of hurt and burning rage it was. The sound is something akin to a wounded animal and it makes him stop dead in his tracks.

Slowly, he turns to look at you. He says nothing, but his eyes are a silent question; mixed emotions of a clarification begging to be answered, laced with a fear that seemed to take over his features at the realization of your words. If he let himself speak, if he found enough of his voice to even attempt to ask you what you meant, what would that mean for the two of you? Even for him and Sohee? He desperately wanted to know your answer to his unspoken question, but he also knew that once he knew, once the words released into the world, they couldn’t be unsaid.

At least now, if he didn’t hear you, he could always excuse himself and you; say he never knew exactly how you felt, that it was just mere infatuation that would subside. But if he knew, in his mind, he knew there would be no going back from the words you would say. He wouldn’t be able to bear the weight of your truth, the gravity of what you truly felt for him.

You, on the other hand though, do not back down. You’re angry and understandably feeling very betrayed, so you let the negative feelings flood out of you; if he wanted out of your life – out of this friendship – then he would also have to deal with being treated like someone who didn’t belong in it. He wouldn’t be spared the aftermath of destroying the one thing you held sacred in this life.

“So what if I love you?” You repeat, “So what I’m in love with you and have been for most of my life?”

The heat in your eyes warns you of the traitorous tears that are threatening to spill over, this time tenfold of how they had the first time, but you power through it not caring if you looked like an idiot in front of him. You believed in fighting for this, for your friendship and for him. If there was ever anything that would ever be worth fighting for, you knew with every fiber of your being that it was this. Between him and the world, you would choose your friendship. You would choose him every time. (It was just unfortunate that for him, that didn’t seem to be the case).

You can see his trapped expression, like a deer caught in the headlights, while you were a freight train headed right for him. All it would take is one step, one twist of the doorknob already in his hand and one swift motion for him to leave to escape the impending danger that seemed to be rushing at him. Worst of all was though, he didn’t even know if he wanted to step out of your path of destruction.

“The fact of the matter is,” you feel the moisture finally escape from your eyes, the words becoming muddled as they mixed with your sharp intakes of breaths and sobs.

You’ve never been religious, but you find yourself praying desperately to any and every divine being there is in the universe that this last hail mary would pay off. You may not have been a believer of gods, but you had always been a believer in this connection with Wonwoo and you would exhaust any and all options before you let it go just like that.

“It doesn’t matter how I feel, because it all comes down to _you_.” You choke on the last word, knowing just how painfully true your words seemed to ring.

“Because you _have never_ ,” you push back a sob, your own tearful eyes boring into his own that now seem to be filling with moisture. Wonwoo may not have been as empathetic as you, but he _knew_ _you_ and with just the shaking in your voice and the pain in your eyes, he could already tell that years of agony and rejection seemed to spill from just the few words you had said.

It wasn’t at all what he had expected. Instead of pushing your romantic feelings onto him, what was happening seemed to be worse than what he had initially thought. Instead, you were resigned to this fate; a yearning so deep but unsatisfiable, a thirst that only he would quench, but _couldn’t_. The realization of true cruelty seemed to wash over him harder than he had ever thought possible, its result personified and facing him directly in the form of your broken form and unsightly begging.

He was wrong. You were not a freight train headed straight for him. It was him. He was an impending crash; the driver of a car you were a passenger to, as he headed straight for a cliff he would willingly (but unknowingly) drive the both of you off of, and yet, with every means for you to escape, you simply refused to. You would happily stand in front of him if he was a freight train; gladly bear the leap into the unknown abyss of a ravine, if it meant you would go down with him. You would set yourself on fire if it meant he could be warm, and nothing broke his heart more.

Eyes shut, as if anticipating the impending collision, you swallow the lump in your throat, and push yourself to continue, “and _could never,_ feel the same.”

There it was. The reality you’d learned to live with. You had come to terms with it long ago, even if just on a subconscious level, but saying the words out loud, speaking into the universe was something else entirely. The agony of admission, of the truth coming to light, spilling from your mouth for the very person who was responsible for your hurt to see and spectate, was a pain unimaginable before this point.

You thought that after experiencing living through and with your unrequited love you could manage anything, but this was a kind of torture even more excruciating than the last. Your bleeding heart laid out on the floor, mangled and bloody for Wonwoo to examine every crevice of its selfish and wounded ventricles. Even more torturous was how he watched it, not so much as even an attempt to retrieve it from the ground; from his end there was nothing. Despite how long you seemed to wait for him to say something, anything, for him to be the best friend you knew he was and tell you that it would be okay.

It’s only when you find the courage to open your still teary eyes that you hear the first sound that breaks through the thickness of the silence:

_Click._

Your eyes barely register his quick movements, only catching a glimpse of his shadow as he exits and closes the door of your apartment behind him.

It was over.

***

> _“For justice, I will show you mine.”_


End file.
